In 2005, Procter & Gamble shut down Reflect.com after launching this customized cosmetics business in 1999. To find the right point of customer interaction was one of the largest struggles for Reflect. The company experimented with many different web site layouts, but also with various own store formats. It realized that for a product like cosmetics a pure online version was not enough. Here, an existing retail network may provide a huge advantage.
The Sacramento Monarchs were one of the WNBA’s eight original franchises and remain the only professional sports teams to win a championship in Sacramento. During their time in Sacramento, the Monarchs were one of the league’s most successful WNBA franchises, making the playoffs every year from 1999 to 2008.
The Monarchs’ last season was in 2009 and their complete dissolution occurred after the Maloof Family, who also owned the Kings at the time, decided to no longer operate the franchise.
The league attempted to relocate the Monarchs to the Bay Area, but a new ownership group wasn’t found and the team ceased operations.
Hollywood Entertainment was one of the first brick-and-mortar firms to partner up with a dotcom, purchasing Reel for $100 million in July 1998. Amazon became the leader in video sales in a market which was nearly winner-take-all. This led Hollywood Entertainment to shut down Reel.com in 2000 and focus on its core video rental business.
At its height, Nortel accounted for more than a third of the total valuation of all companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), employing 94,500 people worldwide. Nortel was declared bankrupt in 2009 after almost a decade of financial mismanagement by its executive team. In 2008, three former top executives had been charged with fraud for misrepresenting Nortel’s financial results between 2000 and 2004
Nortel believed the internet to be just a fad and even began developing their own alternative to it. After they failed to begin developing their own internet-based technology, Nortel purchased several other internet-based tech companies who’s stock price drastically declined. This led to their own stock price plummeting. On top of this, many of the smaller tech companies they had sold their equipment to also went bust meaning they were left out of pocket on those contracts. This cemented a spiral of financial trouble, they couldn’t get out of.
Founded in 2012, Loot Crate was the most popular subscription box service in the world offering mystery boxes. The features of the boxes, or ‘the loot’, ranged from t-shirts and action figures, to snacks and badges. At the beginning of 2016, Loot Crate made it to the cover page of Inc. Magazine as the fastest-growing private company in the US, with more than 650,000 subscribers. In order to combat competition, Loot Crate offered 27 specific niche crates, such as WWE, Harry Potter, and Star Trek. Although customers loved the new crates, the company was forced to order a wide variety of items in small amounts, instead of doing bulk orders on a few items, reducing the profit margin. After a layoff to improve the profit margin, Loot Crate faced backlash over late box deliveries, bad quality products, and boxes not getting to their destinations at all. In 2019, the company filed for bankruptcy after amassing millions of dollars in debt to companies such as Marvel, Facebook, and Trend Setters.
Introduced in 1975, Sony hoped that the video cassette tape industry and all other manufacturers would adopt the Beta Tape as the standard industry format. Unfortunately JVC, a Japanese-owned rival brand, decided to create their own format, VHS, in 1977. Betamax had a marginally better recording quality and a slightly better sound compared to the VHS, putting it at a higher price tag. However, these differences weren’t all that noticeable to the average consumer, meaning they leaned toward VHS almost every time. Sony also believed that it would be fine to cap Beta Tapes at one hour, but that didn’t work for consumers who recorded sporting events, feature films, or primetime television blocks.
Released in 2007, the World Edition was designed for those who frequently travel overseas. It provides voice coverage in 157 countries and e-mail coverage in 62 countries.
Short for Digital Video Express, Divx was released in 1998 and failed only 53 weeks later after losing $330 million. Looking and functioning much like a DVD, the thing that set the DIVX apart was its ability to block viewers from watching the film after a designated period of time which was often 48 hours. DIVX required a special DIVX-capable player in order to function. People absolutely hated DIVX with a fierce, burning passion. DIVX discs wouldn’t play in regular DVD players. Consumers had just begun to embrace DVD, and now there was another format they needed to shell out for.
In 2023 after 86 years, Cardinal Stritch University couldn’t outrun a combination of factors, including plummeting enrollment, constant turnover in leadership, the drying up of its limited resources and the COVID-19 pandemic, which seemingly dealt the fatal blow.
In 2017, Billy McFarland’s Fyre Festival was a fraudulent luxury music festival scheduled to take place on the Bahamian Island of Great Exuma. It was created with the intent of promoting the company’s Fyre app for booking music talent. During the Fyre Festival’s inaugural weekend, the event experienced problems related to security, food, accommodation, medical services and artist relations, resulting in the festival being indefinitely postponed and eventually cancelled. Instead of the gourmet meals and luxury villas for which festival attendees had paid hundreds of dollars, they received packaged sandwiches and were lodged in poorly furnished tents. At least eight lawsuits were initiated against the organizers for defrauding ticket buyers, several seeking class action status, and one seeking more than $100 million in damages. Billy McFarland was sentenced to six years in federal prison and agreed to a lifetime ban on serving as a corporate officer or director.
